Mary Katherine gets transported supernaturally to an entirely new universe; there she takes help from a sleazy group of individuals to safeguard the world from evil forces.
The story has a nice combination of reconciliation, drama and humor. There are some very funny jokes and pratfalls in the film. The kids in the audience laughed at the jokes aimed at them, but this film works for adults too.
The film's chief strength lies in its depiction of a new and exotic world and appreciating how Fox animators envisioned and created such a world. Epic is epically gorgeous in its art design and animation.
Although the basic story is too juvenile and simplistic to entertain anyone with an age in the double-digit range, the themes and underlying ideas are too complicated to capture the attention of someone younger.
Boasts sometimes photorealistic animation and some cool concepts (the heroic 'Leafmen' ride hummingbirds like horses), but it's grounded by the cliche aspects of everything else.
Anyone over the age of 7 or so - not to mention their accompanying adults - isn't going to find too much here to truly engage them, let alone linger past the final fade out.
With its array of goofy sidekicks (Aziz Ansari as a slug almost runs away with the whole picture) and carefully crafted relationships, Epic certainly manages to tell a compelling tale.
A 3D eco-fantasy whose mantra-like insistence that we're all connected by nature is one of the main things that underscores the abject insincerity of the sentiment as the movie articulates it, "Epic" is very nearly epic in its stifling mediocrity.
